Today is Binary Day!

October Binary Days

October 11, 2010

By
Carla Schroder

Today is binary day in the US, 10/11/10. European calendars put the day first, 11/10/10, which is still binary. Yesterday was binary day too, 10/10/10. It might seem like cheating a little bit to use a two-digit year, but I'll worry about Y3k later.

Sadly, I missed 10/1/10. So that is three binary days all in this month. Next year October will again have three binary days.

This October is a bit unusual in some other ways:

5 Fridays

5 Saturdays

5 Sundays

full moon photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

If there were a blue moon this month that would have been extra-cool, but it won't happen this year. A blue moon is the second full moon in a month. A harvest moon this month would have been cool, but that did not happen either. In fact it never will. The harvest moon is the full moon closest to the autumn equinox. This year the equinox was Sept. 23, and so was the harvest moon, a nice treat for nerds like me who are into this sort of thing. The autumn equinox is always in September; I still look for the harvest moon in October because my grandfather always said it came in October. (He was often wrong but never in doubt.)

However, October is when the hunter's moon appears, which is the next full moon after the harvest moon. This year it appears on Oct. 23.

Carla Schroder is the author of the Linux Cookbook and the Linux Networking Cookbook (O'Reilly Media), the upcoming "Book of Audacity" (NoStarch Press), a lifelong book lover, and the managing editor of LinuxPlanet and Linux Today.